Their only protection is to be part of a larger machine. While that's essentially a paranoid schizophrenic vision, the essence of fascism (and all authoritarian political thought, e.g. Hobbes "The Leviathan"), or plain Science Fiction, there is some metaphorical truth in these unhealthy, deeply disturbing images of how American society operates. Ergo, The Matrix "Hive Mind":

Machines that control and harvest thoughts (drawing by paranoid schizophrenic):

Somehow, we are so exceptional that the reality and analysis of class uniquely doesn't arise or apply here. That is because, as I found out over the course of three years in various course and seminars with Prof. Zinn, in American politics, the media, and in academia -- places where elsewhere in the world this subject would constantly be haggled out in public -- we are either under a regime of totalitarian self-censorship or successfully segregated safely away from wider public notice and comment. "Serious people" just don't speak about class in America, not outside carefully controlled forums, anyway, so it doesn't exist.

What gets said on these subjects in paneled committee rooms and graduate seminars never, ever gets covered in the corporate media. That is because news and information in America are products, privately owned and tightly controlled by corporations who have a virtual monopoly on the means of mass dissemination of ideas. That reality has only changed at the margins from what it was in the '80s with the coming of the Internet.

The United States in this sense is the least free of all the western societies, and for more than 75 years Americans have paid an increasingly steep price for that in the poverty of our politics and the inequalities of American society

In the last few days we’ve started to see hints that Syrian End-Game is expected to involve a launch of some of Syria’s giant, and very real, stockpile of chemical and biological weapons (CBW). The strategy of regime change in Damascus pursued by the US and its regional allies may assure that outcome.

As the prospect of annihilation nears, the Generals in Damascus -- almost all of whom are of the ruling Alawite religious minority -- may see little chance to preserve themselves from the Sunni onslaught other than to threaten exercise of their last-ditch option of launching a missile CBW attack on surrounding countries that have been running the armed opposition.

All this indicates that the regime change operations in Syria have reached an incredibly dangerous stage, and Pentagon, CIA and State Dept. officials never adequately planned for the worst-case violent end-phase in Syria, always reassuring the policymakers that they could pull off a nice, easy coup d'grace, a la Libya.

The CIA SAD and JSOC, along with the Israelis, are now publicly preparing a preemptive strike including special forces on the ground to take the launchers. For a close-up, on-the-ground view of the aftermath of a special forces attack on a Scud launcher in Libya last year that left the missiles and trucks largely intact, but nothing left of the crew other than neatly-lined up piles of entrails, see &feature=player_embedded.

Such preemptive air or ground attacks, however, would set off scenario, 1) and then 2):

1) The Syrian leadership finds itself boxed into a “Use-'Em-or-Lose-'Em” Dilemma with regards to its missile forces and CBW stockpiles, and,
2) As Israel, the US and possibly other countries begin decapitating air strikes and commando attacks on mobile missile transporters, the regime initiates a Deadman Trigger Scenario, that assures launch of at least some of its surviving warheads.

What makes the above scenarios frighteningly plausible is as follows.

The core problem with Syrian regime change is that even if Assad is removed, the rest of the Damascus government and high command are almost all members of the same Alawite sect and Ba'ath Party members, and the Sunni militias we and the Gulf Arabs back are hell-bent on killing them. So, even with Assad gone, his successors would also have no option other than to fight to the last or be exterminated, along with their families, by the Syrian Sunnis and foreign al-Qaeda fighters. Whoever planned and oversaw this operation -- Petraeus is one, there are many notable others -- ignored Kissinger’s prime directive of strategic engagement: always leave your opponent a mutually acceptable way out.

The fact that we have entered this stage in the game shows that initial expectations for the regime change program in Syria were incredibly unrealistic. For those who have approved this policy, Syria is fast becoming an epoch, historical disaster.